Detached single family housing don’t belong in major cities, and suburbs shouldn’t be subsidized by the downtown core.

Truer words were never spoken. If you want to be able to live on your own little plot of land surrounded by other people wanting the same thing - then development, upkeep and maintenance of all infrastructure and services needs to be paid for directly from your property tax. When you drive in to downtown to get to work, you should not expect to find parking. Downtown should belong to the people who actually live there, it's crazy how far we bend over backwards to support a lifestyle that's inherently unsustainable.

Whether you hope for it or not, all bubbles burst eventually, and the government has already proven its unwillingness to do anything about it by allowing the bubble to form in the first place.

You want a dystopia, you’ll get it if the bubble bursts. You’ll also get it if the bubble continues to inflate.

Yeah, the range of ways out of this that don't suck are small. Even if you get the mildest of fixes: property values stay steady for decades while they're eroded by normal levels of inflation, that's going to be hell for people waiting for the prices to become reasonable, but also hell for people who bought property as an investment and instead see it losing value. Some of those people are rich, but other people were just using it as a retirement plan.

And for that, we need the political will

The problem is that political will always aligns with the self-interest of the parties or their leaders. Since home owners vote and donate, they're the ones who get listened to. Since property developers donate, they get listened to. Homeless people don't vote, and definitely don't donate to political campaigns. People struggling to make ends meet don't take time out of their busy days to get involved in politics, they just hope someone will help them.

Since politicians invariably come from a class that not only owns houses, but often owns multiple houses, the idea that they'll voluntarily take actions that reduce the value of their investments is pretty laughable.

It would be relatively straightforward to block Monopoly getting played should the bubble burst--legislatively speaking--but it would require governments to intervene against it's donor class.

Hawaii's post-disaster response is a good template: the government has threatened to buy land to prevent investors and speculators from doing the same. In Canada, this would be like a bizarro-world version of Doug Ford's Greenbelt giveaway: where the government buys more land, and more houses, to block speculators.

I can't see it happening, because our leaders are either feckless cowards (on the left) or complete corporate toadies (on the right), but I can dream.